Hot Sleep

by Orson Scott Card

  The silence, almost palpable when the darkness first came, was gradually nudged aside by whispers. But in the darkness no one moved, and the conversations were soon exhausted.

  Then, suddenly, a light. In the middle of the lake. A man standing on the surface of the water. Hop felt a sudden start, a quick memory of a story his mother had told him from the Bible; but he immediately recognized the brilliant colors of looped life, and relaxed again. Neither murder nor miracles today. Just a few doses of technology.

  The man in the lake raised one hand, and silence fell again. Then came the voice, soft and gentle, but filling the entire garden. Hop had to admire the sound work—very well designed, giving an illusion of omnipresence without any obvious stereo effect.

  “My name is Abner Doon. Welcome to my garden. I hope you’ve found it comfortable.”

  Impatiently Hop moved on the branch. Skip the trash, buddy, and get on with the meat.

  “You have all been arrested in the last fortyeight hours, ever since the unfortunate death of Farl Baak. May I assure you that Shimon Rapth did not kill his friend in deliberate betrayal—he was, himself, the victim of a rather elaborate illusion. However, that unfortunate incident did have a fortunate side effect. Every member of your sincere but amateurish plot exposed himself in one way or another. Hundreds reacted by immediately betraying their fellow-conspirators. No, don’t look around at one another—all such have been held somewhere else. All of you are the ones who tried to hide, or who surrendered in order to shield someone else, and so forth. There were many others, of course, equally loyal as you were, who are not here. That is because I have selected from the group most loyal to the conspiracy, those with the most intellect, the most creativity, the most ingenuity, the most impressive record of achievement. The elite, if you will.”

  Well. What a clever bunch we are. Hop sneered inwardly. Congratulate us, and then what? And who the hell is Abner Doon?

  “I think the rest of your questions will be answered if I tell you two more facts. First, there are exactly 333 of you here in my garden.”

  A pause, while that sank in. Three hundred thirty-three. The number of colonists in the standard colony ship: three passenger tubes, each with a mayor, ten aldermen, and ten more groups of ten citizens—111 per tube, three tubes per ship, deliberately set up so that no one leader under the captain could possibly get a majority of colonists to rebel. Three hundred thirty-three. It meant that every man and woman in the group would lose somec privileges once the voyage was over. It meant that they would be irrevocably exiled from Capitol, from civilization, and be forced to rush through the rest of their lives in a mere handful of decades.

  Hop smiled when he realized what the numbers meant. He and Arran had signed up for a colony, nearly—and had been interrupted. Now it looked as though they would go out into deep space after all. Like it or not. Hop didn’t like it—but since he had already made up his mind to do it before, it came as less of a shock to him than it did to the others.

  Only one thorn in his side: He had decided to go before in order to stay with Arran Handully, in a dramatic, chivalric gesture of love (I’ve seen too many tapes.) Now he would be just another man along for the trip. And worse—another man who had never belonged in the conspiracy, an outsider untrusted and unwanted.

  Bon voyage, he wished himself.

  “Second,” said the man in the middle of the lake. “Second, I must tell you that because you have all been convicted of treason against our most perfect and majestic Empress, the Mother of all mankind, your last memory tapes have been removed from the Sleeproom and will accompany you on your colonizing voyage. You will make no new tapes. That is all. Try to get used to the idea quickly—we have little time to waste, and there’s no point in awakening at your destination with bruises and broken arms and legs. In other words, for your own sakes, cooperate, my friends. Good night.”

  And now the murmurs turned into shouts; of dismay, of fear, of protest. The darkness didn’t hear, and the man on the lake disappeared, leaving the night complete again. Some panicked and ran—a few splashes indicated that some of them had quickly run into the major obstacle in the garden. Hop didn’t laugh when someone ran into the tree he was sitting on.

  Convicted of treason meant that all laws and rights were suspended.

  The use of a previous memory tape and the failure to make a new one meant that all memory of their latest waking would be utterly erased. Once somec had drained all but the most basic brain activity, everything would vanish. They would awaken on their new planet remembering only what had happened up to the time they last went under somec. They would know that something was missing—that would be enough to tell them that they had been convicted of treason. They would all assume that their conspiracy had been launched, that they had been defeated. But they wouldn’t know how. They wouldn’t know who had been cowardly or courageous, loyal or treasonous.

  But at least they would know that they were conspirators. Hop laughed at what he would think when he woke on the colony planet. For he had known nothing of a conspiracy before he went to sleep. And this time there wouldn’t even be a note between his buttocks to hint that something was wrong. He alone, of all of them, would understand nothing. Oh well, Noyock decided, what the hell. I’ll survive.

  And then he realized that he would remember nothing of Arran Handully beyond the actress he had seen in the lifeloops. A shallow, seductive, empty woman who mouthed insincere words and made phony love to paying lovers. Not the woman who had come to him in his prison and asked for his help in escaping her (suddenly their) enemies. He wouldn’t remember the heart-stopping moment when she had descended past him on the ladder, hysterically closing her eyes and plunging deeper into the smoke of the exhaust duct. She wouldn’t remember, either, nor would she recall whose voice had called her to come back up. Whose hand had led her to safety.

  It was a little harder to say What the hell now.

  As abruptly as it had gone out, the sun lit up again, and the light was dazzling. Hop closed his eyes entirely, as all around him he could hear people beginning to call out to each other again. Given their vision, they found their voices, and began calling out names.

  Hop left his eyes closed. He would have closed his ears, too, since he wished very much to be alone, but the sounds of the crowd wouldn’t leave him alone. Snatches of grief, worry, anger— “What right do they have!” said one, and the answer, “We are traitors, after all.” (How philosophical.)

  “I have three children! Do they ever think of that?” (Do you? Hop thought. Doubtless she was on somec—it was unlikely that a conspiracy made up of somec users would include a non-sleeper. How much did she think of her children as the drug took her away from them for years at a time?

  And then a voice calling, from a distance, “Hop!” and then closer, saying, “Hop, there you are, I’ve looked everywhere.”

  He opened his eyes. Arran was at the foot of the tree.

  “Hi,” he said stupidly.

  “What are you doing up there, Hop? I couldn’t find you. I walked by here a dozen times at least—”

  “I think I was hiding,” Hop said. He pushed off and jumped to the ground, landing awkwardly on all fours.

  “Hop,” Arran was saying, as he got to his feet, “Hop, I had to find you, I had to talk to you—why didn’t you stay with me?—never mind, nobody could expect you to follow along like a pet or a husband or something—Hop, they’ve posted a roster at the doors. All the colonists, in their groups of ten and hundred.”

  “And?”

  “Well, for one thing, you’re a mayor of three hundred, Hop.”

  “Me?” Hop laughed. “What a joke! Just what I was cut out for.”

  “Well, I’m an alderman, which is just as funny. In your group, for luck! But Hop—it’s the captain.”

  “Who is it? Anybody I know?” As if it would be.

  “It’s Jazz Worthing, Hop. Jason Harper Worthing.”

  And Hop couldn’t think of anything to say to tha
t.

  “Hop, he’s supposed to be crazy.”

  “That’s all right. We’re supposed to be sane.”

  “Don’t you see, Hop? He’s your friend. The notice said that anyone with a question could sign up for an appointment to see him. I signed us up, and it’s only fifteen minutes or so from now.” “What do you want to see him for?” “Us, Hop! We’ve got to see him. He’s got to arrange it for us.” “Arrange what?”

  “To keep our memories, Hop! If they take away my memory of this waking, I won’t love you. I won’t even know you. You’ll just be the manager of that despicable bastard Jazz Worthing, and I’ll be a disgusting, cheap little tart.”

  And suddenly Hop felt very good. She wanted to remember him. He took Arran’s hand, and she led him along to the door. On the way it occurred to him that he would see Jazz again—that it had been two days since he last saw him—that the world had changed since then—that he and Jazz were now on opposite sides of a very high fence. Would they be friends? Had they ever been? (Is there anything that can’t be called into question, eventually?)

  It is ironic that science itself, so long the graverobber of all the gods, should have proved conclusively the existence of the soul. It was certainly not intended, and judging from the acute embarrassment of the team the developed somec when they subsequently discovered the soul effect, they would have avoided discovery at all, if that had been possible. But somec had first been used to prolong the lives of the mortally ill in hopes of a cure for them. It was only afterward that somec’s memory-erasing effect was noticed, leaving the first somec sleepers as mindless vegetables. George Rines was the first to make the connection between the new braintaping techniques and the disaster of ignorant and premature use of somec. When he tried to resurrect the sleepers by playing someone else’s tape into their heads, the result was madness within a few days. There is something not part of memory (and therefore not learned but rather innate in the individual) that remains even after the somec has taken everything else, something that refuses to accept the implanted memories of another person for the simple reason that the new memories are of actions and decisions that the wakened sleeper himself would never have done or made. Rines reported that as an inevitable reaction: The wakened sleepers invariably said, “I remember doing it, but I would never have done it.” They could not accept memories that they had no way of knowing were not their own. For lack of a better word, Rines whimsically named this property of the human individual the soul. Doubtless he meant to be ironic. But further research has borne out the fact that his irony was really accuracy.

  The Soul: Awake in the Age of Sleep,

  2433, preface ii.

  The woman was crying, and, as she left, Jazz wondered why he was doing all this. As Doon had so aptly pointed out, any comfort Jazz might give them, any answers to questions he might offer would all be swept away by somec. They’d remember nothing so why waste time trying to help them?

  But Jazz didn’t see it that way. Though the memory would be gone, these people were still people. They deserved to be treated humanely. “Memory disappears with death, too,” Jazz had pointed out to Doon, “but we still let old people ask questions.” So Doon had consented, laughing, and now Jazz found himself unable to help after all. His gift to see into people’s minds was no particular boon—in this extremity, they willingly unfolded all their thoughts to him, and he could give them no comfort. The decision was made to wipe out their knowledge of this waking; that decision would stand. Yet that decision was the cause of their distress.

  “Next,” Jazz said, bracing himself for another ordeal. But this time, he heard a familiar voice. “Jazz, you hunk of cooler grease! How the hell are you doing?” and then Hop’s arms were around him, and Jazz hugged him back, not the artificial, is-everybody-watching kind of hug they had shared at every docking of Jazz’s ship, but a sincere embrace of friendship. Out of a long-standing habit, Jazz looked into Hop’s mind, and heard there an absurd quotation: “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.” Jazz found the quotation in his memory—a snatch from on old religious book that still haunted Noyock from the time his mother had drummed it into his head in childhood. Jazz smiled, and finished the passage, though Noyock hadn’t spoken it aloud. “And they began to be merry.”

  Noyock looked at him, startled, and then suddenly stepped back. Jazz was still listening to

  Hop’s mind; he heard Noyock’s final, sure realization of what he had come to suspect: Jazz is a Swipe.

  “Of course,” Jazz answered. “Didn’t I tell you so?”

  Hop’s boisterous confidence disappeared. He stepped back, unsure what he should do now. If Jazz could so easily read his thoughts now, that meant that Jazz could have heard every other thought he’d had before. He was embarrassed. He turned to Arran, mumbled something. What he wanted to say was, Let’s get out of here.

  “Arran Handully,” Jazz said. “With clothes.”

  “And Jazz Worthing, with his mind intact,” she said. “It looks as though the tables have turned back again, doesn’t it?”

  “I try to be a graceful winner,” Jazz said. “And I see you have lost none of your grace in losing.”

  “It’s losing that we’ve come to talk about,” Arran said, and Jazz heard in her mind a puzzlement as to why Hop had suddenly become so reticent. Wasn’t it his job to try to influence his friend? “Captain Worthing, Hop and I have found something that we don’t want to lose—”

  “That we don’t believe we have to lose—” Hop said, fumbling for words.

  “If you can help us.”

  “If you’re willing—you see, we—” and Hop gave up the struggle for the right words, quit trying to make sure his words matched the thoughts he knew Jazz was hearing anyway. “Dammit, Jason, you know what I’m trying to say. Save me the pain.”

  “You two have decided you love each other,” Jazz said, “and in a sudden burst of domesticity you want me to have your memories taped so you can remember.”

  “That’s it,” Arran said, but Hop only turned away, his face red. “Hop,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

  “He can hear us, dammit. He can hear every word we’re thinking. He’s a Swipe!”

  Arran half-laughed, turned to look at Jazz, saw a beatific smile on his face, and whirled back to look at Hop. “How do you know!” she demanded.

  “He’s been reading my thoughts since we came in here. And for a dozen wakings before—it all fits together—”

  “A Swipe!” Arran said, then laughed again, nervously. “You can read my—”

  “Yes,” Jason answered, quietly. “When I want to. If you had known that about me, you would have known the probe wouldn’t work on me. I’m used to having other people’s thought patterns imposed on my own. I almost fell asleep under the probe.”

  Arran fumbled for the chair. Sat down. Jazz listened as she tried to drain her mind of all the thoughts she didn’t want Jazz to hear.

  “You know,” he said, “the more you think about what you don’t want me to know, the better I can hear it.”

  It had taken only thirty seconds, and with that comment Arran was reduced to near-hysteria. “Hop!” she cried out. “Make him stop! Make him get out of my mind!” She was crying. Hop himself was trembling, but he understood what she felt, the insecurity of having no secrets.

  “Jazz, please.”

  “I’m not listening right now, if that’s all you’re worried about,” Jazz said. “But you see, don’t you, why I never told you I was a Swipe until this waking. It makes other people very nervous. It makes them, in fact, want to kill me.”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Arran said, regaining some control over her voice. “I just want to get out of here.”

  “I’m sorry, Arran,” Jazz said. “You won’t be able to rejoin the others now. If they knew I was a Swipe, they’d never go under somec at all.”

  “We’ll promise not to tell,” she said, and then she turned back and faced Jazz squarely.
“Oh,” she said. “You’ve already answered us, haven’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” Hop asked.

  “You stinking Swipe bastard!” she shouted. “Why did you tell us that!”

  Hop stood up, put his arm around her. “Arran, you aren’t helping anything—”

  “She’s right, Hop,” Jazz said, maintaining his calm. “If there were any chance that Abner Doon would let any of you have a memory tape, even you, Hop, I would never have let you know I was a telepath.”

  “So now that we know—”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe you’ll fall in love again, if that’s what you want.”

  And now it was Hop’s turn to be angry. “Jazz! My friend!” he said, spitting out the words bitterly. “It’s not being in love that I want. It’s the last fortyeight hours that I want! It’s every damned hideous thing we’ve gone through together! You don’t have a right to take that away from me!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jazz said. “But I can’t change it.”

  Hop tried to shout something else, but the words found no articulation, just a roar of fury and grief and loss as he scrambled around the table, striking at Jazz as he had struck at members of rival gangs in the deep slums of Capitol. Go for the eyes, the throat, the testicles, said his reflexes. You can’t do this to me, shouted his mind. Weep, said the tears in his eyes, and Jazz overpowered him easily, had him sitting in a chair, sobbing like a child before he was sure of what was happening.

  Now it was Arran’s turn to offer a comforting arm, and she softly whispered to him, “Hop, all we can do is think of it as death. We’re being murdered, and in our place they’ll be resurrecting a new person, the person we were at the beginning of this waking. We’re just going to die.”

  “That’s comfort?” asked Noyock, unable to resist seeing the irony. Jazz chuckled softly. “You can shut up,” Arran snapped.